Bev Byrnes — Bowl with mandarins, oil on linen, 2015
Finished this one a couple weeks back. Getting the shadows of the mandarins was a learning process. Going in with brown umbers just didn’t look right, like the fruit was badly bruised. I needed to keep more of the local color in the shadows, keeping it solidly in the orange/red family while also darkening enough to denote shadow. The green of the leaves was a challenge, too. Eventually found a Kremer pigment that worked perfectly as the base, then added yellows and blues as needed. Painting the bowl was fun. It had a subtle sienna-tinged glaze around the underside that played beautifully against the soft blue of the body.
